NEW YORK TIMES: In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found…
Hints at new hidden complexities in the human story came from a 400,000-year-old femur found in a cave in Spain called Sima de los Huesos (“the pit of bones” in Spanish). The scientific team used new methods to extract the ancient DNA from the fossil… (more)
EDITOR: Having read Al Gore’s “The Future” and recognizing the vastly increasing knowledge, will someday scientists be able to clone from the DNA an embryo of a new human being, one with all the traits of his / her 400,000 year old family? And if so, will that person have all of the rights of the rest of us? What seemed a few years ago as fantasy is close to becoming reality.
